1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to dish carriers, and more particularly to an interlocking panel assembly conformed to support arrays of dishes both in the course of their delivery and as a stationary support.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Those engaged in preparing and serving food for consumption by others have consistently faced the burdens an array of dishes entails, particularly when more than one person is being served a full meal at a dining table. In commercial settings this burdensome task has been partly assisted by large carrying trays that were then placed either on any adjacent vacant table, or more frequently, on collapsible stands temporarily erected next to the table being served. The manipulative difficulty of a large tray on its fully loaded path from the kitchen has nonetheless become legendary, even providing endless comedic sequences in many of our films, and various mechanical alternatives were therefore devised to assist the overburdened food service provider.
These earlier assisting mechanical alternatives fall generally into three groupings of dish carrier assemblies that also serve as a stand, the first arranged as a cage within which the dishes are suspended by their edges or arranged as a stack, exemplified by the teachings of U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,064,236 to Stanfield; 5,542,731 to Wills; and others; the second in which dish supporting trays, supports or shelves are cantilevered from a common axis that is provided with a support base, as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 953,007 to Haller; 4,911,308 to Nylund; 6,749,208 to Orozco et el.; and others; and the third in which the peripheral edge of each dish is captured in a cantilevered manner within exteriorly directed notch structures around a common carrying axis that also serves as a support base, as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,088,605, 5,836,458 and 5,944,200 all to Nales; U.S. Pat. No. 7,520,550 and US publication 2009/0195005 to and by Lord; and many others.
Each of the foregoing, while suitable for the purposes intended, either entails a complex, costly and often cumbersome structure, as exemplified by those in the first two groupings, or the simpler, but more precariously suspended and therefore difficult to manipulate, carrying arrangement in which the engaged dish peripheries are relied on to carry the whole plate loading. Both these modalities are particularly bothersome in a busy restaurant setting and a simply constructed dish carrying arrangement that obtains the benefits and deployment convenience of the cantilevering dish edge capture, but in a more stable and redundant form, is therefore extensively desired and it is one such arrangement that is disclosed herein.